Apple and its CEO, Steve Jobs, have a history of bullying people says former Sun CEO. (Source: Getty Images)

Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs : "I’ll just sue you."

Faced
with the growing threat of the Android army of smartphones to its
best-selling iPhone, Apple unleashed
a litany of litigation to try to stop sales of the phones.
Google is too powerful to attack head on, so instead Apple is trying
to pick off the hardware makers, starting with HTC, makers of the
Hero, MyTouch, and Nexus One. There are a lot of questions over
whether Apple's barking up the wrong tree, however, given how broad
and vague its patents seem.

Jonathan I. Schwartz, former
CEO of Sun Microsystems, sounded off in a
blog in which he recalls a similar incident in which Apple
CEO Steven P. Jobs threatened to sue his company.

Jobs contact Schwartz, warning that the Linux project
was "stepping all over Apple’s IP" and that if they put
it out on the market, "I’ll just sue you."

However,
Schwartz was wily and knew how to fight back. He had helped
found Lighthouse Design, which made software for the short-lived
NeXTSTEP operating system, which was acquired by Apple with the
purchase of NeXT in 1996. A Lighthouse NeXT product,
Concurrency (presentation software -- think PowerPoint), looked
eerily similar to Apple's recently unveiled Keynote.

So
Schwartz fired back at Jobs, "Steve, I was just watching your
last presentation, and Keynote looks identical to Concurrence – do
you own that IP? And last I checked, MacOS is now built on
Unix. I think Sun has a few OS patents, too."

Jobs was
quiet and never threatened Schwartz about the product again.

He
notes that Jobs isn't the only litigation bully in the tech industry,
though. He recalls an exchange in a later meeting with former
Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and current CEO Steve Ballmer, about
OpenOffice, a popular Sun product. In the meeting Gates
threatened, "Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and
our patents read all over OpenOffice. We’re happy to get you
under license."

Recalls Schwartz, "That was code for
'We’ll go away if you pay us a royalty for every download' – the
digital version of a protection racket. Royalty bearing free
software? Jumbo shrimp. (Oxymoron.)"

Sun countered the
threats with comments about the similarity of .NET to patented
material in Sun's popular Java platform. Commented Schwartz,
"We’ve looked at .NET, and you’re trampling all over a huge
number of Java patents. So what will you pay us for every copy of
Windows?"

Again, the threats were dropped.

Schwartz
says that big companies trying to bully others with litigation stinks
of desperation. He writes:

I
understand the value of patents – offensively and, more
importantly, for defensive purposes. Sun had a treasure trove of some
of the internet’s most valuable patents – ranging from search to
microelectronics – so no one in the technology industry could come
after us without fearing an expensive counter assault. And there’s
no defense like an obvious offense.

But for a technology
company, going on offense with software patents seems like an act of
desperation, relying on the courts instead of the marketplace.
See Nokia’s suit against Apple for a parallel example of
frivolous litigation – it hasn’t slowed iPhone momentum (I’d
argue it accelerated it). So I wonder who will be first to claim
Apple’s iPad is stepping on their IP… perhaps those that own the
carcass of the tablet computing pioneer Go Corp.? Except that
would be AT&T. Hm.

That's
some interesting perspective from one of the electronics industry's
top players. It's clear that Apple is bullying HTC; Jobs didn't
even give the company so
much as a hint before slamming it with a massive lawsuit.
Is Apple's suit against HTC a desperate and misguided measure?
And will Google, who supports HTC, threaten Apple back? That
could get interesting.

“So far we have not seen a single Android device that does not infringe on our patents." -- Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith